The Clone Sedition

by Steven L. Kent

  Under normal circumstances, I would have hit him in the nose or throat as he raced toward me. A shot to the crotch or the eyes would have worked as well; but I wanted to chat, so I kicked out his kneecap instead. His leg buckled under him, but momentum carried him into me and we tumbled backward. As we wrestled on the ground, he tried to wedge his forearm under my chin to choke me. He worked his way on top of me, slammed a fist into my face, and tried to pry my chin up.

  The blow left me dazed for just a moment, but I recovered quickly. I was in the midst of a combat reflex, my senses heightened, my brain moving in double time.

  I wrapped a hand around the man’s wrist and twisted it over. He tried to pull the hand free as the smaller bones popped and separated, and he screamed in pain as I pulled him off my body, using his broken hand like a lever. A few feet away, his friend lay on the floor, suffocating slowly, his face turning blue, his hands clenched around the crushed larynx. In another minute, he would die.

  With his leg and wrist broken and his friend dying, the Marine forgot he was a Marine. He backed away on his ass and tried to climb to his feet. I grabbed one of his ankles and pulled his feet out from under him. As he fell, he tried to break his fall with his broken hand. He howled in pain when he hit the ground.

  I grabbed his arm and wrenched the broken hand out from under his body. I was in full combat reflex now; seductive warmth filled my head. As I climbed to my feet, I placed a foot on his broken wrist and pressed my weight on it.

  I might not have wanted to kill them before the reflex; but now, with the hormone running through my veins, murder appealed. I looked at the clone with the crushed throat. His eyes bulged, his mouth formed an O, and his lips had turned blue. He’d die in a few more seconds; only a field-trained surgeon could save him.

  For just a moment, I wondered if slicing the man’s neck and forcing a tube in his throat would continue my combat reflex. I asked myself if I could possibly keep the hormone flowing with an act of mercy? The notion intrigued me, but I let the bastard die.

  The survivor lay on the floor cradling his hand, which had swollen to the size of a catcher’s mitt and turned purple. I said, “I need to make a quick call. Don’t run off.”

  Battlefield humor. The bastard was not about to leave; he had gone into shock.

  I pulled out the remote. “Jackson, you there?”

  No one responded.

  I tried again. “Jackson, report.”

  Nothing.

  Thinking I might have broken the remote during my wrestle, I switched to an open channel and listened for chatter. My men had gone silent.

  The train had crossed the spaceport by this time. Looking out the window, I saw the automated air locks. Once we passed the air locks, we would enter the Martian badlands. The train slowed as the first door of the air lock slid shut behind it, preserving the breathable atmosphere inside Mars Spaceport. The outer door opened, and we slid into the wastelands.

  “Churchill command, come in.” I contacted the ship to see if the remote still worked.

  One of Cutter’s lieutenants answered. He asked, “General, do you need to be sent through to Admiral Cutter?”

  I said yes.

  When Cutter came on, I said, “I have a hot mess down here. Somebody tried to gas my men.”

  “Do you know who?” asked Cutter.

  I said, “I’m still investigating, but I think it was Riley?”

  “Did you say Riley?” asked Cutter.

  “I caught the men with the gas. They’re clones. The question is, who sent them? They were on their way to the Air Force base.”

  “I see a train leaving the spaceport on my monitor,” said Cutter. “Want me to stop it?”

  “Hell no. I’m on that train.”

  “What about your men?” asked Cutter.

  “I can’t find them,” I said. “I told Jackson to circle the wagons, now he’s not answering.”

  “You went out on your own,” said Cutter, demonstrating a knack for stating the obvious.

  I looked down at my two victims. One was dead. The other had pulled himself together. He sat on the floor holding the arm, his face pale. I said, “There is a lot going on here. More than we know. There are a couple of Spaceport Security men on the train with me; one’s a bit stiff but the other looks like he might be helpful.”

  Cutter asked, “General, will you be able to control yourself long enough to have a productive conversation?”

  I told Cutter, “I’m sure we will get along fine,” and signed off.

  I sat down beside the man with the broken wrist. He looked like a scared child as he regarded me. I asked, “Ever wondered about life after death?”

  He did not answer.

  “You will know the answers very soon, Marine.”

  He said nothing. No surprise.

  I said, “I heard you and your buddies chatting. One of you said I was a Liberator clone, another one didn’t believe him. Which one were you?” There had been a third clone, but I was trying to make a point.

  He asked, “Are you Harris?”

  I said, “In the Liberator flesh.”

  He surprised me by showing some backbone. He gathered his strength, and said, “Get specked, you alien-loving bastard.”

  “What happened to my men?” I asked.

  The son of a bitch did not utter a word. He might have cowered during our fight, but now he was acting like a Marine. This wasn’t a scared little lamb like the idiots back in Seattle; this man had faced death before.

  “Listen up, Marine,” I said. “It has been a long day, and I am not in a good mood. Now tell me what happened to my men. That is an order.”

  It should have been in his programming. Post-Liberator military clones followed orders automatically. Tell them to do push-ups, and they start humping the ground before their brains register what they’re doing. At least, that was how it was supposed to work. I had just ordered this son of a bitch to answer me, but he wasn’t talking.

  “You specking tried to gas them, asshole,” I said. “You tried to gas them, now I can’t reach them. What happened to them?”

  He stared at me like a young, scared cadet trying to stand up to a drill sergeant. I said, “Okay, then let’s start with the easy stuff. What’s that?” I pointed to the oxygen generator.

  He said, “It’s an oxygen generator.”

  “What were you doing with it?”

  He whispered, “Generating oxygen.” He closed his eyes and laughed, but terror showed on his face when he opened his eyes again. By that time I was wringing his shattered wrist like a soggy towel.

  I said, “We’ve got a few minutes before we reach the base. Come clean, and I might even let you live.”

  He stared at me in silence.

  I said, “Maybe you’ve already made up your mind to play it the hard way. Do you have any idea how much pain I can cause you before we dock?” As I said this, I wrung his wrist a second time.

  He did not scream. He whimpered.

  I loosened my grip. “Why do you want to kill my men?”

  “We weren’t trying to kill them,” he said. I started to squeeze again, and he shouted, “No. No. Really! We knew you would stop the gas. It was a distraction. We were supposed to distract you.”

  “Distract us,” I said, relaxing the pressure on his arm. The gas was a feint, and I had fallen for it. “Distract us from what?”

  The man did not answer. I got the feeling he did not know. I asked, “Who sent you? Riley?”

  “The colonel is not in charge,” he said.

  He turned toward the front of the train. I followed his gaze. Looking through the windshield, I could see Mars Air Force Base in the nearing distance. It looked like a butte in a desert, tall and flat and deep in shadow.

  “Kill me,” he said.

  I stood, as if I wanted to get a closer look at the base, and then I kicked him across the face. I had probably broken his jaw, which was not my intent, and I gave him a concussion from which he would not
soon wake up. I stripped the bastard naked and tied his hands, feet, and mouth with his clothes. I wanted him to stand before a military tribunal. I wanted him tried, interrogated, and hung, so I stowed him with his dead friend in a cargo compartment for safekeeping.

  If I was killed while exploring the Air Force base, the bastard would starve to death or die of thirst. Maybe he would develop a gangrenous infection and die in delirium. We both had a stake in my survival.

  The train slowed as it approached an air lock that led to the base. The outer door slid open, and we rumbled into the tube. The door closed. There was a soft whoosh as indigenous gases were flushed away, then the inner door slid open.

  I did not know who would greet the train. The train station was brightly lit. I could not afford to be seen. Because I had a clone’s face and stood over six feet tall, any clones who saw me would instantly identify me as a Liberator.

  The train rolled slowly as it left the air lock and approached an empty passenger platform.

  I recognized the base from the time I had visited it many years ago.

  “General?” a voice purred from the remote. I reached down to shut it off, but stopped when I saw who it was.

  “Jackson? Where the speck have you been?”

  “Right here, sir.”

  “I have been trying to contact you,” I said.

  “The bastards must have blocked our signal.”

  He sounded fine. A security force like Riley’s probably did have “sludging” equipment for blocking interLink signals. Such equipment was not uncommon, but I did not think my regiment’s disappearance could be explained that simply. If they had blocked the signal five minutes ago, why had they stopped blocking it?

  I did not have time to ask. The train had rolled up to the platform, and I had to move.

  I said, “I need to go,” and signed off.

  Places like Mars Air Force Base have discreet security cameras built into their walls and in the ceilings. They have electronic ears that can detect footsteps, breathing, beating hearts; and thermostats that can detect the change in temperature when a body enters a room. There was no question the security system had detected my presence. Whether or not anyone watched the monitors was another story. Maybe they did, and maybe they didn’t. I only knew one way to find out.

  I stepped off the train and crossed the platform without bothering to look for cameras. If they had people staring into monitors, they’d already seen me.

  The only way from the train tracks to the base was up a steep escalator. I climbed the stairs two at a time as the escalator whisked me up. No one met me at the top.

  The base lobby was dimly lit, spacious, and clean. The air was cold, my breath turned to steam; but there were no picnickers, which made this icebox the Garden of Eden in my mind. Moving at a fast creep, I crossed the shiny, black, granite floor. I was not alone.

  When I reached the door that led from the lobby to the offices, I heard voices. I stopped, listened, then took a few steps back. I pulled out my communications remote. “Jackson.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Load your men on the transports, double speed.”

  “Yes, sir. Are we going back to the Churchill?”

  “No,” I said. “Come to the Air Force base and tell your men to hit the deck running. I think the locals might put up a fight.”

  “Do we get to shoot this time?” he asked.

  “This is not a civilian facility, Colonel. You have permission to kill anyone who gets in your way.”

  “Aye, aye, sir,” he said with more enthusiasm.

  I contacted the Churchill and gave orders to “wreck the rails and board any ships seen leaving Mars.” Then I switched off the remote.

  There were people in the base, but not very many of them. No one entered the lobby the entire time I was there. The train still sat idle beside the platform.

  I left the lobby and entered the work area, expecting to see clones. I thought Riley might have moved his clones out of the filthy spaceport and into the nice clean Air Force base. I suppose that was what I would have done. A moment later I knew I was wrong when I saw a woman walking down a dark hallway.

  Seeing the woman, I formed a plan of attack in my head. If Jackson moved his men quickly, and Colonel Curtis Jackson always made his men hustle, it would take them forty minutes to break camp, cross the spaceport, and board the transports. They might get bogged down cutting across the grand arcade, but I doubted it. The locals had quieted quickly when they saw blood the day before, and I did not think they would make another show of defiance.

  Twenty minutes to board the transports and five minutes to fly from the spaceport to the base. Flight Control on the Churchill would override the base computers and take control of the landing bays.

  Riley outnumbered us three to one, but the Churchill would send more troops once we established a need. Riley would still outnumber us, but our transports had protective shields; he’d have no way to hurt us until reinforcements arrived, and we lowered those shields. By that time, he’d know he had no place to hide.

  I passed through a mess hall. A base this size would have a large mess for enlisted men and a smaller one for officers. I spotted a group of natural-borns sitting around tables chatting and eating. I did not see clones; nor did I see banners with slogans about Legion. If anything, the mess hall looked regulation.

  The people paid no attention to me as I walked by and I pretended to ignore them as well. I listened to their conversation as I passed, but they did not say anything important.

  After leaving the mess hall, I entered the next set of doors and found myself in a large auditorium/briefing hall. The place was empty, huge, and dark as the inside of a coffin. I left, moved on down the hall, and entered the base’s nerve center.

  This area of the building bristled with life. Computers whirred. People gathered in clusters and spoke in whispered tones. Diagrams and maps hung on the walls. Holographic images wavered in the air. All of the people I saw were civilians, natural-born, some of them women.

  I stepped into an empty cubicle. A woman followed me. She said, “We’ve been watching you since you entered the train station.”

  I turned, and met her gaze.

  She said, “You’re a tall one. You must be Wayson Harris.”

  “Who are you?” I asked.

  She smiled and said, “We were going to come to you, but you were kind enough to save us the trouble.”

  There was a scent in the air, a sharp chemical scent that was unpleasant and familiar. I knew I had smelled it recently, but I couldn’t remember when or where. I caught a whiff of it, then everything stopped. I did not become dizzy. I did not spin and fall to the ground. I did not have time to do any of these things. The universe had already ended.

  CHAPTER

  TWELVE

  “You can’t lose a specking regiment of Marines. You might as well say you misplaced gawddamned Mars. What’s the matter with you?” I asked. No, “asked” is too subdued. I snarled. I growled. I cannot remember ever in my life feeling such intense anger. “They’re here. They’re in the Air Force base right now. I ordered them to come, and they came.”

  “How did they get there?” Cutter asked.

  “What the speck do you mean, ‘How did they get here’?” Everything about the man irritated me. I hated the way he stared back at me through the screen. I hated the confused look on his face.

  “I mean, Harris, how did that regiment of Marines travel from the spaceport to the base? They didn’t fly to the base. We’ve been watching the spaceport. None of the transports have launched. They couldn’t have taken the train; you told us to shoot out the rails.”

  “Either your crew is asleep at the wheel, or your ship is broken, Admiral,” I said. I kept my voice even, hoping to hide just how much I hated the bastard. “They flew here. They boarded fifteen transports, and they flew here. How the speck do you miss fifteen transports? They’re big. They’re slow. They probably radioed in for clearance befo
re they left the spaceport. Check your damn records.

  “You know what? Don’t check your records. The transports are here, my men are here, I don’t give a shit what your specking records say, Cutter. I watched Jackson walk down the ramp. If your records say something else, then you’ve got bigger problems than a few missed transports.”

  “Maybe,” said Cutter. He outranked me, but I was the one who gave him his stars. I was starting to wonder if he deserved them, the incompetent bastard.

  Everything about him irritated me. I didn’t like his idiot expression or the way his face looked like the face of every other sailor in the Enlisted Man’s Navy. If he’d been here in the flesh, I might have hurt him. When I got a shot at him, I might even allow myself to kill the son of a bitch just for the fun of it.

  I took a deep breath and held it. Stand down, I told myself. He’s just another clone in a Navy of clones, it’s not his fault.

  “Listen, Cutter, we’ve infiltrated Martian Legion headquarters. Okay? I’m closing in on the objective. I’ve almost finished what I came here to do. You got that? Am I getting through to you?”

  “Yes, you are,” he said. He was losing his temper, which meant nothing to me. Freeloading son of a bitch, I thought. Let’s see you climb off your specking ship and face the enemy.

  “We’ve almost got this operation complete, and the last thing we need is for you to get in the way, so pack up your specking space patrol and get the hell out of here. Do you understand? Do you read me?”

  He looked so angry that I thought he might lose control. That would have made two of us. For a moment I thought he might try to pull rank on me; and then we would have a real problem.

  “We’ll clear out,” he said.

  “Good move,” I said.

  “Do you want me to leave Watson?”

  “Why the speck would I want him around?” I asked. And then I said something that made no sense. I did not know how the words had entered my mind or what they meant. I said, “Give him a message for me, would you. Tell that bastard anything that’s programmed can be reprogrammed. You tell him that. You tell him that for me.”